Royal wedding spectacle

Just now we're all bouncing up and down in the wake of two tremendous events – the royal wedding, obviously, and President Reagan's complete triumph both in the Senate, where his party has a majority, and in the House, where the Democrats have a 52-seat majority.

The splendour of the wedding was predictable but Mr Reagan's ability to get exactly what he wanted with a 25 per cent tax cut in the next three years was not only not predictable, it was confidently predicted months ago by the Democrats and confidently feared by the more experienced Republicans that, like any other new president, or any president with a radical economic programme, he would have an early lesson in an old American tradition of having any programme on anything that leaned well to the right or the left being firmly led back to the centre where most Americans live and hold their strongest convictions.

In spite of W. B. Yeats's warning, which has been much quoted in recent years, that the centre will not hold, the Americans, in their political habits, have stubbornly hewed to old James Madison's 200-year-old prescription that the American form of government could best avoid turmoil and hold the allegiance of the people by sticking to three principles – compromise, compromise, compromise.

When I heard the margin of the president's astounding victory in the House, which has the final say on money bills – 238 to 195 which means that all but nine of the Democrats voted his way – I thought back to a trip to Washington I made nearly 30 years ago to see the then Speaker of the House, Mr Sam Rayburn of Texas. I was busy in those days with a television programme which did all sorts of features on music, the arts, science, politics and we'd decided to do a documentary feature on what it's like for a young man to run for Congress to win and then to examine the contrast in his feelings between what he thought Washington would be like and what he found it to be.

It was an attractive idea but very soon we came to the conclusion that the best thing would be to do not a documentary, but a dramatised version, a made-up feature film and, for the young and innocent, may I pass on my old friend, Nunnally Johnson's definition of the difference between a feature film and a documentary. A documentary, he told one of his own enquiring children, has no stars and no box office.

Well, having picked our writer and our star, I went to Washington for we'd hoped to give the thing some verisimilitude by doing some filming in and around the Capitol and the House in particular. Mr Rayburn would have none of it. He was aghast at the news that we were going to use an actor to represent a congressman. 'Do you remember', he said to me, 'a dreadful libel on the Congress done by Hollywood called "Mr Smith Goes to Washington"?' I do and I did. 'Well,' he said, the veins in his neck swelling like serpents and his billiard bald head glistening with sweat, 'it was an outrage! It was a slanderous attack on the finest body of men I have ever known.'

If he'd been anything but a courteous Texan, he would have kicked me out. As it was, and I was bowing myself out in a state of great discomfort, he threw at me, 'Have you ever met an actor? They do their teeth over to look pot-white and they wear a scratch.' A scratch is the Texas word for a wig or what we now demurely call a styled hairpiece.

I thought of Mr Rayburn sweating and howling in his grave to hear that an actor had not only come to Washington to represent a senator but a real actor had gone to Washington, become a real president and cowed and triumphed over the wariest politicians both young and old on the American continent. And even Mr Reagan's most grudging opponents are now reporting sadly, as a fact, what Mr Reagan, as a candidate, boasted or promised he would do to reverse the whole economic policy of American government in the past 50 years – the policy of spending your way out of a Depression by the system of deficit financing, which President Roosevelt came to by instinct before he had his instinct reinforced in his only meeting with the late John Maynard Keynes.

When Mr Keynes left the White House, President Roosevelt called in his Secretary of Labor, a woman, by the way, named Frances Perkins. 'Well,' said Madam Perkins, as she was known, 'you see now why you're on the right track.' Roosevelt blew out a plume of smoke, bared his most winning smile and said, 'Frances, I haven't the slightest idea what he was talking about. He just spouted mathematics.'

Well, those famous days are now over. Thirty years ago, the Republican leader of the Senate said, 'We're all liberals nowadays.' And less than ten years ago, Mr Nixon, commenting on one of his budgets, said, 'We're all Keynesians nowadays.' No more. We're all Reaganites or so the November landslide seemed to say and the name of his economic game is Reaganomics. He got through a massive cut in spending in his budget, he just got through a massive cut in taxes. We're left to wonder how the third part of his programme, a massive increase in defence spending, can sustain the great loss of revenue from the other two.

Well, while Mr Reagan was bracing himself and spending his days and nights on the telephone wooing his wobbling opponents for Wednesday's vote, Mrs Reagan parted for more than a week from her husband for the first time in 29 years, Mrs Reagan filled in for him by performing a glamorous duty he very much wanted to fulfil himself, namely to appear in St Paul's at the royal wedding. It is true that the date, July 29, had come to be a crucial date for him. It was the day of the tax vote in the House of Representatives but there was another consideration very much on the minds of the White House and of the Lord Chamberlain's office in the Palace, namely, as one official put it, 'A whole new dimension to the security problem if the president came.'

However, like incalculable millions of Americans, he was present by his television at the great event. I don't know how many Americans asked any friend of theirs going to London, 'Are you going to the wedding?' It was assumed by many people that the cathedral would be jammed with famous actors, actresses, writers, commentators, columnists, bankers and whatnot. By Wednesday, at the latest, they learned the elaborate and exclusive protocol that restricted the guest list to friends of the Royal Family, to ten grades of royals, to picked heads of state and not much more.

But even with this briefing, I'm sure that I shared the vague, splendid fantasy of most Americans. I can't tell you what this fantasy is. Like all fantasies, it was illogical and misty and lit by a halo. So, I went over to London, where I am now, to see for myself.

The last preliminary piece I read in an American paper was a dispatch in the New York Times from Madrid, a pretty good-natured piece considering its main theme which was a comparison of the costs of maintaining the different monarchies of Europe. Since the piece was written from Spain, the most revealing item was the report that it costs almost as much to keep up the royal yacht Britannia as it does to maintain the monarchy of King Juan Carlos. This was the only, you might say churlish, note that I read in the American press.

In view of what I've read in the past, I should say that there was a singular absence of carping or of (populist) pride in all the reporting and the editorials about the wedding. Maybe the now-exiled staff of President Carter let off a mutter or two but Americans who warm to the Reagan administration should be the last people to be put off by the grandeur and opulence of the great show, for President Reagan has brought back to the White House the curious and quite new trappings of the Nixon era – men in skin-tight white uniforms brandishing long trumpets. These White House heralds had no precedent before Mr Nixon decided to invent for himself a court. These strange musical comedy heralds of no known military or ceremonial heritage, were scornfully repudiated by Mr Carter who accused Mr Nixon of creating an imperial presidency.

Mr Carter, you'll remember, at his inauguration, walked from the Capitol hand-in-hand with his wife. He dismissed the heralds as Hollywood décor and banished also a very old tradition, that of having a marine band or orchestra play the tune, 'Hail to the chief' whenever and wherever the president appears.

Towards the end of Mr Carter's 1980 campaign, he became so apprehensive about the rumble of the coming landslide that he reinstated 'Hail to the chief' in order to assert a little official grandeur and set him off from his upstart rival from California. It was too little and too late.

Then came President Reagan and 100 inaugural balls around the country and what the journalists vaguely call 'style' was back in the White House. 'Hail to the chief' everywhere and always and the skin-tight white pants and the trumpets, recalling probably the most splendid wedding that Mr Reagan could recall, that of Madeleine Carroll and Ronald Colman in 'The Prisoner of Zenda'. But I must say that in all the preliminary pieces and television programmes that I saw on the royal wedding, no such comparisons were made.

Americans have a very alert admiration of fine theatre and, on that ground, if no other, they not only admit, they boast, that the best theatre anywhere is the Trooping the Colour and now it's agreed on all sides that the precision, the grandeur, the ease and exactness of the wedding was an actual performance unequalled anywhere.

Well, now that the great show is over, we are back to politics and energy and crime and drab life as usual. For dubious meditative Americans though, there appears a reproving shade. If any American thinks to imitate the monarchical splendour, it is the shade of Thomas Jefferson who despised George Washington's fondness for soldiers and costumes and outriders as 'tending away from Republicanism and more toward monarchy.'

Jefferson, who rode alone on his nag to his own inauguration, spoke his piece to the Congress in an inaudible voice, went out, unhitched his horse, rode back to his boarding house, ate his supper at the lower end of the table and went to bed.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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